Miyamoto on working with western devs on Nintendo franchises, is all about trust

Western studios have been put in charge of prominent Nintendo IPs over the past few years. Retro has worked on Metroid and Donkey Kong. Monster Games has also been involved with the latter series in addition to Pilotwings. And let’s not forget Next Level Games, which has worked on a pair of Mario soccer titles, Punch-Out!!, and Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon.

Nintendo must have a good amount of faith in the western studios it collaborates with these days, but that level of trust wasn’t always there. ONM, curious as to why this has changed in recent years, quizzed Shigeru Miyamoto for some answers.

Miyamoto told the magazine:

I think the biggest factor is that level of trust you mentioned. We built the level of trust with those companies and we know we can rely on them. The second thing is a change in our approach. Once we would have looked at them and asked what a company can do independently and we would support them as needed.

Whereas now we’re looking at really working together. Particularly, for Luigi’s Mansion 2, Nintendo is the producer of that game. We call them second-party developers where they’re developing the game but we’re producing it and that’s where that level of trust is built.

Thanks to joclo for the tip.